


All Summer's Worth

by NovaStars42



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cowboy AU, Cowboys, Cows, Horses, Western AU, better Bro Strider, fanon Bro - Freeform, fast horses and freedom, home homestuck on the range~, professional bull riding, ranch work, rodeo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 21:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11322075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NovaStars42/pseuds/NovaStars42
Summary: Vignettes featuring Bro Strider as a cowboy. Inspired by a Tumblr post by @Jayspants.Chapter 1- Checking fences turns in to brotherly bonding with fast horses.Chapter 2- Rodeos bust more things than broncs and pride.





	1. Brothers

**Author's Note:**

> This was just supposed to be the first installment but then I ended up writing the second half and I liked that better so I posted both!
> 
> None of this is beta read, just fed though an online checker. If you see an issue let me know!
> 
> Art by @jayspants! Wonderful, wonderful personnthat they are. http://jayspants.tumblr.com/post/162477301765

Checking fences was grunt work, but there was no one else to do it. He’d been at this for hours already, riding up and down lines of barbed wire. Each time he saw a break in the fence he had to dismount and fix it.

  
There was nothing like spending a whole day running rusted wire through his worn leather gloves, and God forbid the whole string come down as he was fixing it because then the goddamn thing would just come back and hit him in the leg. That’d happened already, actually.

His white straw hat matched his shirt, both in color and amount of dirt caked on it, but neither were a match for his jeans. His pants were covered in pond scum, after having to swim into the lower pasture’s drainage pond to unclog a covert. His face might be dirtier yet, with two days worth of stubble and a fading sunburn.

Needless to say, fixing fence was not Bro Strider’s favorite chore. But it was either that or the cows get out. The cows getting out weren’t exactly an option.

  
The sun was going down, thank god, taking the hot Texas heat with it. He stood up in his saddle on the tired soles of his feet aching in his round toed boots. Bro let his horse walk a few strides before he sat back down. He didn’t dare take his feet out of his stirrups to stretch them too, he just didn’t trust his mount.

Bruno was a big, Medicine Hat marked paint. A gelding; built like an iron tank but dumber than a sack of hammers. The horse was also prone to exploding in to bucking fits without warning, grunting and slamming his front hooves into the dirt and kicking his hind legs out almost vertical to the ground. Bro needed the horse for work, but this was the last time he owned a horse with blue eyes. His grandfather had been right, they were crazy.

“How you holding up, little brother?” Bro asked, twisting around to glance back at his younger brother, Dave. The kid wasn’t much in to ranching, hence why he was riding Bro’s old high school rodeo horse, a nearly bombproof chestnut mare.

“Fine,” he replied, shifting uncomfortably in his saddle. The seat was a little small for him, Bro guessed.

“Almost done,” Bro replied, “were just gonna walk this fence all the way to the barn and we’ll go in.”

“Great. What are we having for dinner?”

Bro thought on that for a minute. “Dunno. Meat, probably.”

“Take my pick of cow huh?” Dave snorted. Because that was pretty much what they had in the freezer. Beef, beef and more beef, and then a ten-year-old bag of peas in case somebody got a black eye.

“We should go up town and eat,” Dave suggested. “It’s Friday, we should get fish.”

“It’s eight o clock, and it’s an hour drive to town,” Bro shook his head.

“We’d make it if we raced,” Bro could hear Dave smirk.

“You only want to race because you know Fresca is faster,” he chuckled, glancing back again.

The sky behind Dave was a watercolor painting of colors. The fading blue sky was highlighted by a golden glaze on the horizon line, casting the day's last shadows and turning the earth before it dark. A deep red owned the bottoms of gray clouds, like fire licking its way up into them without touching the earth. The red played off of Dave’s pale hair, washing out the color in his face and making his features appear as dark as the lenses of his shades.

Fresca, the mare, plodded along quietly, her brown coat shining red like she’d captured the sun and draped herself in it. She’d been his team roping horse, and then a barrel racing horse for a friend’s daughter, from there she came back to Bro and he used her as a sorting horse on cattle chutes. Now she carried Dave around their couple hundred acres, but Bro was sure she still had the getup and go.

“Bruno has longer legs, he might win,” Dave offered, licking his chapped lips. “And you’ve got spurs on.”

“He’s got longer legs, but it takes more energy to get his fat ass moving. Besides, I stick him with these spurs and we’ll probably be headed to emergency instead of dinner,” Bro frowned at the thought. The barn was in sight, however. He didn’t say anything for a moment, instead, he looked down and checked the buckles on his saddle bag. Then he glanced down at the straps on his breast collar, and then finally with one last glance back at his brother, he flipped his feet out of his stirrups. He waited for his horse to start bucking because that’d be just his luck, but the fit never came.

His knees creaked, but he managed to undo the buckle keeping his spurs on and stuck them into the back pocket of his Levi’s.

“Count of three, alright?”

“Alright,” Dave replied, trying not to sound too excited. Out of the corner of his eye, Bro could see Dave urging his horse into a bumpy, ground covering trot so both horses were even.

“One,” Bro spoke up over the crunch of the weeds under the horse's feet. Dave was already asking his horse to canter, but he was holding her back, the mare’s head up and the colored nylon reins tight.

“Two,” he said, urging Bruno past a trot and right into a rocking canter. With his free hand, he grabbed the loose end of his long leather reins to keep them from slapping his horse's shoulder.

“Three!”

As soon as Dave put his reins forward, Fresca’s stride lengthened and she took off like she’d been shot out of an eight seventy. She pulled away from him, hooves thundering across the earth. If Dave hadn’t had a keeper on his hat it would have blown straight off.

Seeing his friend was leaving him, Bruno kicked it into high gear too. The chunk of a horse couldn’t keep up, but Bro wasn’t about to be left in the dust. He leaned in close to the horse's neck and sat quiet, pushing his heels into the paints sides and urging him on.

The barn was drawing closer, and Bro could hear his Walker Hound howling as Dave rounded the corner and slid on the gravel to a stop. By the time he started slowing down, his thighs were burning from hanging on without his stirrups. As if he wasn’t bow legged enough, he’d be feeling that tomorrow morning.

“Whoa,” he commanded, pulling back on his rein to stop his horse. Bruno gave in quickly, dropping down to a trot, and then stopping. Bro got off and lead his horse into the barn after loosening the cinch holding his saddle on. He excepted to see Dave walking his hot horse out, but instead, the kid was standing in front of a stall, Fresca still tacked up next to him.

“What?” Bro inquired, stepping into the yellowed barn lights.

“I won,” his brother answered with a shit eating grin, and moved on.

“We already knew that was gonna happen. I was the one that called it,” Bro rolled his eyes. He lead his horse into the dirt-floored barn, and into a stall. He pulled his bridle off first and hung it on a hook outside of the stall.

“Yeah but still,” Dave said, leading his horse into the neighboring stall. “It was kinda fun going fast.”

“Yeah, it’s fun,” Bro agreed.

Bro pulled his saddle next. The pad came with it, and Bro hefted the leather saddle up into his arms and carried it to the tack room. He threw the thing up on the wall mounted rack and huffed. Dave stumbled in with his saddle next, and Bro took it from him to put up on the wall.

“I was thinking,” Dave said, looking down at the dust covering his hands. “Maybe this summer, when I’m off school, I could come help you? Like with the cows and stuff.”

Bro thought on that for a minute before he answered. “Yeah. That’d be pretty sweet.”


	2. Rodeo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKj9KiEByc0

Bro swore up and down he didn’t have anything to prove. Not to his buddies, not to four empty beer cans, not to his age or any other washed up cowboy at this whole goddamn rodeo. He didn’t even want the money. He had a whole wall full of hard-won belt buckles at home.

But somehow he ended up on the back of twelve hundred pounds of black and white Brahman bull.

He didn’t have a helmet on or a vest and he was very aware of that fact as he climbed the chute and looked down at the hunk of chuck he’d drawn. Screwdriver was his name, drew him by chance out of a hat before the rodeo started. He wasn’t so much mean as he was fast, Bro’d been told, and he twisted his back end real hard.

Bro settled down on his back, right behind the big hump on his neck, and grabbed the rope looped around his chest.

“Alright,” some young gun wearing the rodeo company logo shouted from the other side of the fence. “You hold on to that there rope for eight seconds without getting thrown off, and your ride gets to count. You get judged on your performance as well as the bulls, assuming you get a time, and at the end, the best score takes the cash. You use one hand only, put the other where I can see it. You get busted up and you’re responsible.”

“This ain’t my first bull,” Bro spat, sour. “and you ain’t the first jackass to try to tell me how rodeos work.”

“You gonna watch your mouth, or dust ain’t the only thing you’re gonna be eatin’,” the man threatened. Bro rolled his eyes. He didn’t much give a shit, honestly. Bro had probably been riding longer than this guy had been alive.

“Tell me when,” another man on the opposite side of the fence said, his hand on the rope keeping the chute shut.

Bro nodded. He took a split second to compose himself. He shifted his weight down into his heals, squeezed with his knees, then with his thighs and tightened his grip on the rope. He could feel the heat of the bull under him, he could feel the creatures hide and the slippery texture of its fur. He could feel the bull, getting restless, shifting its weight and dancing in place.

Bro drew in a breath, and then let it out.

“When.”

The gate swung open, the dirt arena laid out in front of him for a split second. He was blinded by the bright lights on overhead, deafened by the the crowd screaming, all before the bull under him exploded. He went up on his hind legs, and bounced like a spring out of the chute, and landed hard on his front end.

Bro’s knuckles were white, and he threw his free hand up in the air as the bull started to twist. His back end went up, feet kicking out to the left, and then the right, and he spun on his front end. The trick was to move with gyrations, but that was sort of hard when the movement was unpredictable. The bull was hot, and he frothed at the mouth, saliva flying as he snorted.

Bro felt it when he started to slip. The bull went right when his hips tried to ride left, and it was over. He tightened his grip on the rope, hoping to keep on just a few more precious milliseconds. He had no idea how much time had passed, and no idea how long he still had.

The bulls hips snapped, and then there was no saving himself. He was going off. He let go of the rope to prevent himself from getting drug, and he dropped off the left side with one final buck.

Bro went down hard and practically bounced off the ground. Sand grit between his teeth, and when he opened his eyes, he was meet with a face full of cloven hoof. Something crunched, and Bro hoped it wasn’t his skull. He cringed, shutting his eyes and his hand going to his cover his face. Blind, he tore away from where he lay, desperate to get away, that or be trampled.

The buzzer went off as he fell into the fence, catching himself on his arm and pulling himself upright. He opened his eyes, blinking away tears and big black spots.

“Nice ride, but no time,” the loud speaker boomed, too loud and too sharp. Bro’s ears rung, loud and disorienting.

On the other side of the ring, a pickup man on a horse chased the bull with a rope into a gate that lead behind the chute and a man was on Bro’s left side trying to clear him out of the arena. It was over just as fast as it started.

Bro wasn’t sure how he got back behind the chute, but he remembered walking out of the stocks, out of the grand stands and into the darkness of the field being used as a parking lot. He didn’t stop until he got to his truck, his friends forgotten.

The keys were still in the ignition, and his cell phone was still in the passenger seat. He hoisted himself up into the driver’s seat, and under the dim cab lighting, he noticed the blood on his shirt.

He put his hand back up to his face, and when he pulled it back it was covered in more blood than he thought safe. He turned the rear view mirror around as he regained some of his senses. Not only could he smell blood now, but he could taste it, and he could see it painting the lower half of his face red, and dripping in big droplets and staining his white shirt.

“Oh fuck,” he swore and deciding his shirt was already ruined, he took it off to press the soft cotton to his nose. He winced but held it there.

Bro wasn’t exactly sure what he’d been thinking, getting up on a cow after so long. He quit riding when Dave was three, and he hadn’t so much as thought about it since. That was eighteen years ago. God, he felt old.

Maybe he did have something to prove. And maybe he’d prove it tomorrow night, on another bull, in the next town over.


End file.
